It has to be a jolting, incredible feeling of rejuvenation to go back to the time of being a high-school teenager. I don't think I would want to yet the idea of knowing how it all turned out, that is to say an adult transposed in the body of a teenager, leaves a lot of questions about fate and circumstance. Can one say that if I was a teenager again, I would do it differently. Well, the knowledge is there but the adult woman, Peggy, can't really change things yet her reality as an adult can become that much clearer. "Peggy Sue Got Married" is a joyful, subtle adult comedy that ends on a positive note with a dose of reality attached it.
Kathleen Turner turns in one of her most precise dramatic performances ever, showing a woman in the 1980's reluctantly attending her high-school reunion. She is Peggy Sue Kelcher-Bodell and she's going through a separation with nasal-voiced Charlie "Crazy Charlie" Bodell (Nicolas Cage - an insanely over-the-top yet finely tuned performance). At the graduation, she's crowned queen of the night and faints. When she wakes up, she's back in 1960 as a high-school teenager giving blood at a blood bank. Her friends are concerned (after they drop off Peggy Sue at her house, she tells them "Hey, keep in touch") and her parents don't understand her when she starts drinking - never mind Dad buying an Edsel. Even more nonplussed is Charlie, a wannabe rock singer whose nasal-voiced tone seems to charm Peggy Sue despite the fact that she wants nothing to do with him. Charlie can't understand her mercurial behavior and she is shocked that he wants to date other girls, giving a hint of what's to come. It is that antediluvian thinking that can only come from a teenage mind - if they date other people, then they will know they were really meant to be. Only Peggy Sue's life has become far more complicated from her future marriage with Charlie and she begins to seek out other guys, including a future brainiac billionaire and a beatnik poet type. The billionaire inventor (Barry Miller) is the class nerd who has to be punctual at his Rocket Club meeting! Peggy asks him about the possibility of time travel and then further reveals the price of sneakers in the future, not to mention the moon landing. With the poet who has issues with Ernest Hemingway's writing (Kevin J. O'Connor), it is about attraction and a quickie, nothing more. He of course imagines a strange existence in a Utah cabin where he believes in polygamy. Eh, stay away from that guy, Peggy.
This is one of Francis Ford Coppola's most beguiling and becalming movies ever, and the temptation to get sentimental is shrugged for a muted emotional reunion (the short bit about Peggy visiting her grandparents, one played by Maureen O'Sullivan, is a cinematic treasure to behold). Although I would've loved more emphasis on Peggy's relationship to her parents and her pigtailed sister (Sofia Coppola), I can't fault a movie for its dreamlike power overall. "Peggy Sue Got Married" is not so much a fairy tale or a time travel movie but actually about a woman who is uncertain about her future and yet so confident and upbeat about her past. An emotional marvel of a movie.
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